Wolves at the door in Oregon

When it comes to wolf management, Idaho’s present is Oregon’s future, several speakers said Feb. 19. At a Wolf Free Oregon meeting, speakers from rural Idaho warned Oregonians — especially those in the northeastern corner of the state — that wolves will overrun populations of elk and other wildlife, continue to attack cattle and other livestock, damage the region’s tourism economy and threaten public safety. “What we have is headed your direction,” Rex Rammell, an activist and former gubernatorial candidate, told the group at the Veterans of Foreign Wars building in Enterprise. “Our elk herds are gone.” Idaho ranchers have also endured huge livestock losses from the 839 wolves estimated to be in the state, Rammell said. Wolves killed an estimated 413 cattle and sheep in 2009 alone. Last week, a rancher near Joseph lost two pregnant cows to wolves and other ranchers have lost an estimated 36-50 cattle to wolves in the past two years. State and federal officials sometimes do not agree on whether wolves killed livestock, so numbers vary, according to past news accounts. “They did not put oatmeal-eating wolves in the Bitterroot, and they did not put oatmeal-eating wolves in Oregon,” said Mike Popp, a hunting guide who said he has seen the damage wolves caused to the elk populations in Idaho. He lives in the Lolo region, where he said elk population plummeted from 16,000 in 1995 to 2,100 currently...more